(This post originally appeared in FastCompany.com)

Last week I attended a fascinating forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation. As is often the case in any discussion about the demands of work and family, the need for work flexibility was front and center, with the primary challenge being, “How do we get middle managers to support it?”

Middle-manager support can be the difference between success and failure of a work flexibility strategy and, yet, it remains elusive. The advice on how to solve the problem ranges from “Put the policy in place. Tell managers this is the way it is. Reward those who do it and punish those that don’t,” to “You can’t lead a horse to water. I guess you need to wait for the dinosaurs to die off [sigh].”

In my experience, a top-down policy and an ultimatum will fail. It only creates more resistance. And waiting for a generation of managers to leave is not only inefficient, but it unnecessarily leaves money on the table as the organization and its people miss out on the benefits of flexible work.

Over the years, we’ve succeeded in getting even some of the most skeptical middle managers on board the work flexibility train. But it requires a larger upfront commitment of resources (e.g. time, money, and people) than it takes to write a policy or rely on attrition. However, the return on that investment is a group of middle managers who not only accept work flexibility but understand how to use it as a powerful tool to run their business.

Here are five the ways we’ve gotten middle managers to support flexible work:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves, bottom up and top down.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Make sure that work flexibility in the organization is built on a partnership model where employees have as much responsibility for the success of it as the managers do… (For more, please click here)

I invite you to join me on Twitter @caliyost.

Post originally appeared in FastCompany.com

In all of the years I’ve helped companies rethink the inflexible ways we work, I’d never seen anyone coordinate an effort to get 100 organizations in the same community to embrace flexibility at the same time. That is until I met the indefatigable Shifra Bronznick and her team at Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community (AWP).

The mission of AWP is “to promote the leadership of women within Jewish communal institutions and to advocate for healthy workplace practices that benefit both men and women.” The issue, as AWP defines it, is that a majority of the professionals in the Jewish nonprofit community are women, while most of the leaders are men. AWP wants to close that gap.

More details regarding the multi-faceted change process they’ve undertaken to close that gap can be found here, but one of the primary solutions they’re targeting is greater workplace flexibility. To promote a more formal, strategic approach, AWP created the Better Work, Better Life Campaign which is “aimed at enlisting 100 Jewish organizations in improving their policies on flexibility and parental leave.”

Recently, I was invited to present at a convening of 30 of the Better Work, Better Life organizations to discuss strategies to advance flexibility. This gave me a unique opportunity to observe first-hand what happens when organizations from the same industry gather to share best practices and support innovation in workplace flexibility. Here are my three key takeaways from the event:

Lesson #1: Peer-to-Peer Influence is the Most Powerful

Humans resist change with every tool they have at their disposal. And the most powerful weapon of all is, “Oh, that might work for an accounting firm, but it won’t succeed in manufacturing.” In other words, we dismiss the applicability of something new because we believe that a unique quality of your industry or organization makes it non-transferable.

But it’s much harder to dismiss information when it is comes from an organization with a business model that’s just like yours. In this case, nonprofit and mission-driven. When Sari Ferro from UJA-Federation of NY shared the steps that she followed to get a more formal flexibility process implemented in her workplace, you could tell from the follow up questions that her story prompted the group to see possibilities, not roadblocks.

Lesson #2: No Matter Where You Are On the Flex Innovation Curve, You Can Be Part of the Same Conversation.

There’s a standard flexibility innovation curve that most organizations follow. And while it’s important to meet organizations where they are on that curve, there’s a benefit to having the more advanced entities in the same room with those just getting started.

During the Better Work, Better Life convening, I facilitated a discussion of the strategies that we’d covered throughout the afternoon. At my table sat representatives from a couple of organizations that were relatively far along the innovation curve in terms of advancing formal flexibility and a couple of others for whom it was very new. Yet, you could see that the experience of those who had “been there done that” informed the thinking of those just starting to dip their toes in the water.

Lesson #3: There Are Many Creative Ways to Scale a Clear Vision for Change

The clarity, passion and commitment of the AWP team to advance their mission has driven them to develop creative vehicles to scale their efforts and impact including,

• AWP Action Teams–Training others to be change agents and fan out into the broad community.
• The Bay Area Project–Leveraging the success of the large number of women in the Bay Area who occupy senior positions in Jewish foundations to influence change.
• Men as Allies–Engaging influential men to advance more shared leadership. This effort include “Sign the Pledge’ where men agree not to appear on public panels without women.

Spending time with the 30 organizations that participated in the Better Work, Better Life convening reminded me of the power of peer influence, and how beneficial it is to share best practices no matter where your organization is on the flexibility innovation curve. Imagine how much further along we’d be if groups of accounting firms, advertising agencies or hospitals worked together and shared best practices related to flexibility.

Finally, never doubt the power of the clear vision of a small group as they scale and grow in impact. Go AWP!

For more, I invite you to join me on my Fast Company blog and on Twitter @caliyost.

How Employees Can Partner with Employers: Work+Life Fit in 5 Days Series

Work+Life Flex “How to” in Pictures: #1 Don’t get stuck on the innovation curve

Work+Life Flex “How to” in Pictures: #3 Focus on fact that same flexibility keeps business open in snowstorm, cares for aging parent (and more)

Work+Life Flex “How to” in Pictures: #4 Making flexibility real takes more than traditional policy, toolkit and training